Animal of the Week -- September 25, 2009

So, apparently, according to naturalist and film maker, Chris Packham, the money we spend conserving this week's animal of the week is wasted and that the species be consigned to the rubbish bin of extinction. And when you think about it, a bear that eats bamboo, mushing up tough grass with it's slicing teeth and trying to digest cellulose with a stomach designed to handle flesh, fruit, and insects Ailuropoda melanoleuca (giant panda) might be said to not do themselves any favours.

But rather than put them down, Packham, perhaps we should celebrate their bold decision. Rather than go the easy route, eating all the usual old stuff that other bears eat, these chaps have struck out on their own. They're bear mavericks. And anyway, you can't conserve species forever, so yeah, they will die out eventually, inevitably, so will rats, so will mosquitoes, so will humans, but isn't it the innovators that might evolve rather than simply fizzle out? The last common ancestor of whales, dolphins, and hippos was probably a vegetarian, now look at dolphins whizzing 'round the oceans eating fish -- they'd have never got there if they'd just stuck to the veg. And then the ancestor of the blue whale, the largest animal ever, made the bold move to start eating krill -- the only thing so abundant and tasty as to allow it's mammoth size.

So perhaps the panda should be protected; maybe, from this monochrome ursid miracle of existence a whole new future family of herbivores will arise. Maybe not, but who is to know? Packham suggested that we need to preserve the habitats rather than the creatures. But what are the habitats without the creatures? What are the creatures without the habitats? We need to preserve the opportunities for evolution. And anyway, pandas may be a bit ridiculous, but at least they didn't spend the eighties and early nineties dressing a hybrid of Billy Idol and Limahl.

Animal of the Week -- September 7, 2009

Time flies when one is having fun, also when one is flying oneself. It's been so long largely because I have been doing my bit to entice tropical animals into the temperate zones, to increase habitat for drought tolerant plants in the tropics, and to make the Maldives substantially damper. But the upside to my enormous carbon footprint is that I have seen loads of amazing animals -- from right whales in Cape Town to marmots in the Swiss Alps. So what wonder is this week's animal? What can possibly be remarkable enough to beat whales and marmots out of the AOTW title?

Well, this week's animal, the first for a good many months is Parus major (great tit). This small and typically insectivorous bird has sealed the prestigious AOTW slot following the observations made of Hungarian tits published in Biology Letters this week. During the cold, Hungary, winter months, when other food were scarce, some Hungarian birds were seen to turn on bats for food. Preying on hibernating pipistrelles, the tits would the aerial mammals to death then eat the tastiest bits. There is a video of the birds in action in this news story (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8245165.stm), although for all the fidelity of the video the bird could be pecking a child's shoe. The photo further down the page of the aftermath is much more graphic.

This behaviour does not appear to be that widespread, perhaps a singular quirk of that particular Hungarian population of tits.

Great tits can be found from western Europe to south Indonesia. Residents of the UK will be more than familiar with great tits, as they are one of the most common garden birds. With their green back and bright yellow underparts (or underpants as I always read it), they are instantly recognisable and can easily be distinguished from their relatives in the UK because they are the largest in the group... although I always thought the Royal Family were the biggest tits in the UK.